It Happened on Vashon

My Vashon Island life, chronicled on and off since 2006. Family, friends, travel, open water swimming, chickens, honeybees, foraging, growing stuff, practicing PR. A very good life in a beautiful Pacific NW setting.

Friday, March 31, 2017

Dancehall Reggae Lovah

Since the end of January, I've been volunteering at our island radio station, Voice of Vashon, with a reggae and reggae-hybrid format. Borderlines can be heard via live broadcast on 101.9fm if you're on the island, or voiceofvashon.org anywhere in the world from 1-3p every Thursday!

And if you love reggae, don't miss Clinton Fearon playing live on April 21 (Fri) at the Red Bike at 9p. Get your tickets ($10) here: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2897611

Clinton visited the studio this month and did a fun interview on the show. Check it out! If you can't make the show, head to iTunes and get his new album This Morning. It's full of bittersweet yet uplifting songs and you won't be sorry to own it.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Robert E Kelly, you're one of us.

Dude, we've all been there (all work-at-home/telecommuting parents, that is). You just happened to hit the mother lode on an international newscast.

Look on the bright side, you're now THE go-to commentator on Korean political affairs, and lookie there, you're HUMAN. Shit happens. It's okay. Your kids are fabulous and your wife deserves a medal or recruitment to a baseball team with that slide into the safe zone!

Sunday, March 12, 2017

The Pool in the Plastic Bubble

Vashon, bring it on! Work it out, refine the plan, and vote the mother in!

We can use the extra aquatic year-round resource. I'm all in. Thanks VPD, for your consideration to get the county pool operating continuously. Not just for the swim team, but for all of us. My hope is a beautiful and fair compromise can be talked through to make this happen.

Wednesday, March 08, 2017

International Women's Day: On Sexual Abuse

Today I won't be silenced. I won't be shamed by another, and I won't FEEL ASHAMED. The last time I blogged about this I was quickly "guilted" into taking the blog down, sparing the feelings of someone close to an offender of mine, sadly one of many. That sense of guilt brought back the same shameful feelings of concealment as when I was hiding abuse. It's an awful feeling that twists my gut and hurts as it runs through me.

Women and girls put up with a lot of shit. A LOT OF SHIT. Today (and everyday, really) is a day to speak out in protection of women and women-to-be. It's a day to lift up those around us. It's a day to share and shake demons. It's a day for me when I say "enough," and unearth some really sad events I have refused to allow to define me. Instead, these events instilled a fire from which I draw to right wrongs, compete harder, earn more, and walk away from situations I recognize as destructive or toxic.

I hardly know where to start. Maybe it's with these hands that are typing. My right hand and wrist are adorned with several two-, three- and four-inch scars I've had since the age of 14. My left hand is responsible for these scars. At that point, I'd already been sexually abused by three different people for half my young life!

Mom and stepfather sent me to a psychiatrist when they finally noticed the cuts, but the psych certainly wasn't interested in why I was cutting and only asked me about life at school, in a new city. I was a strong student so school was fine. He filled out insurance forms every visit, never looking at me or REALLY talking with me, and he wasted no time prescribing me psychoactive drugs...right after the first visit, come to think of it. I put them in my mom's medicine cabinet and let them be. Later, in a blue spell when I felt I needed them, I discovered my stepfather had taken them, leaving only an empty bottle. He told me my mom didn't need to know about that. I have heard that before. The psych never learned why I cut. I was a crypt where secrets were safe and peace was kept.

When I was six, I was asked to conceal our babysitter's husband beating my little brother (note: my mom was a single working mom until I was 10). Vicky was the evil witch's name. When the beatings continued, I had to say something. We ended up with a new babysitter and soon after I was the one being abused.

At age seven, a neighbor babysitter, the daughter of a prominent Coronado family counselor, corralled me, my brother and another boy (family friend) to perform lewd acts on her. On more than one occasion, she would enter our bedroom after we'd gone to bed (bunk beds). She was usually drunk and typically had boys over at our house, but once they left, she did that. She was my mom's "date night" babysitter.

That replacement babysitter mom had us stay with for after-school care was a lady who had a litter of her own mostly-grown kids. There were Jesus figurines and crucifixes all over her home, including the bedroom of her son Rich (19? 20? at the time) who lured me in, shut the door and blocked me from exiting. Threats. Whispers. Lewd acts. Reciprocation. I kept looking at the crystal doorknob from his bed, wanting out. Then, as if my stomach hadn't turned enough, he finally opens the door to let me out, puts a few coins in my hand and whispers "buy yourself some candy." I played outside with the sitter's neighbor kids pretty much every day after that for the next couple years.

By age nine, my mom started dating a new guy. She was happy. He started to stay more and more. When she was gone one day, had me undress completely on the living room floor. His hands went everywhere. I stayed perfectly still and silent. I knew it was wrong. My mom was in love. She wanted to marry this guy. She struggled to put food on the table. Brion and I both sometimes stole candy and snacks to eat; that was after once running up a school lunch account and getting busted. He would provide for her. And us. I said nothing.

I was furious when she came back married to him one extended weekend (we were babysat that particular weekend by a junkie who shot up for three straight days), but feigned happiness for her. For her, it meant love and security. For us, not so much (read: three schools, three cities, four years). We were uprooted from Coronado after a couple years and moved too much. Many inappropriate incidents followed in the years to come, coincidentally (not!) on those rare occasions my mom traveled to see family.

While living in Walnut Creek, mom had left town for a visit, my close brother at a sleepover and the baby bro asleep, and my stepfather announced we were going to play a drinking game: one shot of beer each minute, versus all 100 pounds of me at the time. Within the hour I was vomiting in the bathroom. I woke up late the next morning in my bed--without clothes--and no recollection after puking. Then in Boise there was the shower incident. I had a talk with mom about that one; she went crazy. But then I had to deal with confrontations from him. Pretty soon I just stayed nights with my boyfriend instead of coming home.

I had enough credits to graduate HS early. I also had a full-ride textiles scholarship in Idaho (Vandals!), but I'd be damned to stay there. I was ready to go home to CA, see my dad, friends, and start my own life, one in which I had complete control. I also decided it was time to share everything with my mom. I wrote a letter and hid it in the attic bedroom and instructed her to find it. She left my stepfather the next year. She had him documented as a sex offender in Idaho on her way out.

A few years later, while living back in CA, I received a letter from the x-step, asking for forgiveness. My skin crawled when I thought of his hands manipulating the pen and and touching the very paper I was holding. I couldn't reply. Never did. I was still filled with rage. I wanted him punished. I wanted him destitute. Scot-free.

"Familial" inappropriateness aside, I took some more external knocks coming through those years. At 16, I was date-raped by someone I really liked (but I wasn't ready to have sex with him). I blamed myself until years later when people actually started to talk about date rape. It happened again when I was 20 by someone else. Lesson: don't go to HIS place unless you intend to be penetrated. I wish I was kidding. What's worse, someone I with whom I was in a steady relationship in between decided to take liberties one night while he was wired on speed - I've written about that not too long ago. And you know what? That's just as icky as being date-raped.

Even in college, a professor pursued me, showing up several times at my work (a public place); it deeply offended him when I refused his little gifts. I dreaded having to go to his office for the required lab time with him, alone. He was never talking academics, just flirting and being disgusting. Compared to what I'd been through, this was easy. I talked to the dean and the prof's female assistant, who had also been harassed by him. In those days, there wasn't a campus advocate to get shit done. I was granted a class change to a new professor, but that didn't protect the next poor girl to get his class, right?

Women and girls have to ask for help. And they also need to be educated early on that THIS SHIT IS NOT OKAY, and it's not their fault, and to take action to get out of the situation. We need protection and enforcement. I didn't have that. Without advocacy it's easy to fall into the background, or end up in a rotten relationship you don't know how to leave. How do you know what unacceptable is if the bar has been set so low in your upbringing, or you lack self-esteem to can rise above a pile of poo?!

Relationships with name-calling, belittling, bullying, threats, financial abuse and physical intimidation are just as serious problems as sexual abuse in my book. I have seen firsthand the lives changed through the work of the Dove Project on Vashon. If there is one place you want to make a donation today, put it there!

Through it all, I'm okay. I know my sense of justice is a perpetual chip on my shoulder from these experiences. These scars on my arm have softened and flattened over time; the hurt is long gone, but they'll always be there, like a rough road traveled to get to the open highway.

Wednesday, March 01, 2017

Special Agent H

First trip of 2017: San Diego, pictured with childhood Coronado classmates at Sean & Michele's wedding!

As much as I've posted on this blog, I tend NOT to post a lot about what's happening in this work world. Part of that is because many of the projects I take on are accompanied by NDAs (where I cannot talk about them because they are things/brands/products/restaurants in development).

First, let's back up. What the heck do I do to make a living? I write. I sell. I shape. I also cut out words or messages for people/brands that don't need to be part of the "sale" or the "pitch." Oh yeah, sometimes I also pitch media. Mostly, I write.

When I was 8, I remember writing and illustrating stories, mostly when visiting my dad every other weekend. These were little stapled-together pages I called -books- entitled, "Frog and Rabbit make friends..." and then came a whole series of spin-off adventures. Reading and writing came early and easily for me. I noticed my younger son, Zachary, also picked these skills up very early.

By eighth grade, relocated from Coronado to Salt Lake City with my mom, two brothers and a stepfather, I remember a new stern English teacher instructing my class to spend 25 minutes writing short business letters from the topics listed in a book. I didn't understand we were only supposed to write just ONE letter (she said letters, plural!). I raced the clock with total focus to write out all six in the textbook and succeeded. When it was time to pass in the work, the teacher was shocked in a tickled way. Ms. Hull, I remember you! I still didn't realize this aptitude could pay the bills one day.

After studying everything from journalism to telecom to communication theory at UH, and getting an FCC license for a radio show, running the campus student film and video club for a year, and interning as a casting assistant for TV commercials (everyone wants to film in Hawaii), being an on-set PA,and before that working in CA as an intern at the PolyGram Group Distribution (A&M for me) promo office, this vast umbrella of comm exposure served me well. After graduation there was ad agency work, then features/newspaper writing, to freelance copywriting, Gannett, to PR agency work, to corporate (wnie) communications, And now I'm basically Special Agent H.

Today, I'm doing food, wine, hotel, lifestyle and restaurant work--some with digital or pr firms, some direct work from repeat clients. And it's so fun! Precept Wine, The Pink Door, Ivar's, Tini Bigs/Hula Hula spot projects, a new Hyatt, more legacy restaurants, and agency brand strategy have kept me buzzing from one project to the next.

I am grateful for the opportunities that come through hard work and relationships. I am learning to keep an awesome work-life balance (swim/exercise, volunteer, take a trip or four!).

About Me

North End Vashon Islander and mom to two awesome young men. Blissfully married to David, the multi-talented avenger. Making my own living, not spending other people's money. Living on Vashon Island, pop 10,000, land of lawyers, naturalists, artists, foodies, and so many backstories. Wanna read some?